No mascara was applied in the making of this photo. Hehe.

Shot in color (thoroughly uninteresting), then converted to LAB color in Photoshop, where I used the Lightness channel to get the really high key effect and add a little sharpening. Then converted to greyscale to get rid of the boring color information.

On a side note, over on the Digital Photography School forum (a great resource, btw), there seem to be a lot of people who are against post processing and even regard it as “cheating”. I actually used to have this feeling too with digital photos, until I realized that I was “cheating” all the time with my film negatives. That is, if “cheating” equals using contrast filters, dodging, burning, over-exposing/under-developing, etc. These things are not cheats, they are tools. There are certain subjects that will never give you a perfectly exposed photo, or portray exactly what you want them to. Think about all the shots Ansel Adams took of the Grand Canyon and Yosemite – you can bet there was some post-processing (in the form of dodging and burning) going on there, otherwise he’d have a really blown-out sky or no detail in the shadows. All I’m saying is, don’t call those tools “cheating” just because you don’t want to take the time to learn them. A perfect photo does not come straight off the negative, or your RAW (or jpeg) image file. The perfect photo is the one that looks exactly like you wanted it to.

“You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” ~ Ansel Adams

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